The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Interesting that the United States, the United Kingdom, and
the UN General Secretary have all voiced concern about developments in Hong
Kong and called for restraint.

In other words, what we see is creeping internationalization
of the Hong Kong issue.Given the
relatively minor and local character of the matter to date, at least, it makes
one pause.

After all, the current toll in Hong Kong is a few dozen
injured after some confrontational street protests, some tear gas got fired,
now everybody’s sitting around waiting for Occupy Hong Kong’s latest move.

Why give a sh*t about a currently fatality-free civic ruckus
inside China’s sovereign territory even as the US refeeds the Middle East
through the military meatgrinder for the umpteenth time, mass graves of
slaughtered civilians are uncovered in eastern Ukraine, and the U.S. can’t
bring itself to censure Israel for a disproportionate military operation in
Gaza that killed 2000 including 500 children?

Hate to say it, but the inference that the U.S. sees
profitable mischief to be made in Hong Kong is inescapable.

I believe that Occupy Hong Kong is a legitimate local
movement with legitimate local grievances and is pretty much a local
phenomenon.

I also believe that its leadership has spent months planning
the current campaign, and part of that campaign involved keeping the United
States informed and coordinating sub rosa with the United States to exploit the unrest to apply pressure on the PRC.

Bernhard of Moon of Alabama unearthed a fascinating budgetary item for the NDI in 2012 (and also, I must own, rebuked
me for my naivete in regarding the Hong Kong demos as home grown):

National Democratic Institute for
International Affairs - $460,000

To foster awareness regarding Hong
Kong's political institutions and constitutional reform process and to develop
the capacity of citizens - particularly university students - to
more effectively participate in the public debate on political reform, NDI will
work with civil society organizations on parliamentary monitoring, a survey,
and development of an Internet portal, allowing students and citizens to
explore possible reforms leading to universal suffrage.[boldface by Bernhard]

As I tweeted at the time, “Must admit it did not occur to me
that the sophisticated civil society in HK would need a legup from US on this issue.What did they do with that $460K, dig up Cady
Stanton's corpse [Cady Stanton was an early suffragette heroine] & ship it
to HK?”

The intertubes also disgorged a picture
of Hong Kong democracy avatars Anson Chan and Martin Lee getting face time with
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in Washington on their way to an NED meeting.Biden was perhaps entrusted to share his
insights on democracy but he is also the Obama administration’s go-to guy/flak
target for the global regime managed-transition megilla.

Unreported in Western prestige media, unsurprisingly because
as far as I can tell (the China Matters media budget precludes unrestrained
clicking and reading of paywalled and quota’d coverage, and relies excessively
on parsing journos’ self-congratulatory tweets) the Western coverage, without
naming names, has been embarrassing to the cringe-inducing level.

OK, I won’t name names or outlets, but there is a certain
prestige paper that has stockpiled a considerable inventory of journalists
evicted or otherwise unwelcome in the PRC, and whose management has apparently
decided that its investment in their reportorial excellence (unleavened, undoubtedly, by any sense
of personal grievance) should be cashed in on a beat it considers the story
of the year/maybe decade/maybe century.(And,
as the Hong Kong brouhaha evolves, I wonder if the PRC will strike back at its
media tormenters by hyping in its turn the burbling allegation that a certain
PRC news honcho is facing the death penalty in Beijing because he leaked the
skinny for a story that a certain paper claims as its unaided, crowning
achievement in PRC coverage to date.)

Back to Hong Kong.

The prevalent media memes, as far as I can tell, are Darling,
Darling Demonstrators; Tiananmen Redux; and Xi Jinping Is Totally Pwned!

Addressing the last one first, the obsession with CCP
supremo Xi Jinping’s Hong Kong-related mindset, as far as I can tell, contrasts with rather skimpy coverage of a story that
journos in Hong Kong are very well-positioned to cover, by virtue of location,
sympathy, and contacts, which is the strategy of the Occupy Hong Kong movement.

For the edification of my readers, my take on the strategy
is that the whole campaign has been carefully gamed and thought out: start with
student demonstrators; expect/provoke police over-reaction; call for Chief
Executive to resign (where we are now); bigger demonstrations; adult leadership
represented by Dr. Benny Tai emerges; more sophisticated demands, perhaps for resignation
of the Chief Executive through some legalistic process involving the
Legislative Council, maybe followed by formal pro-democracy referendum; ??.

As for the CCP’s response, it seems to also come out of its
standard playbook: Local Guy (Hong Kong Chief Executive C.Y. Leung) gets his chance to contain the crisis,
predictably f*cks up, crisis portfolio turned over to elite CCP team for
careful, focused management behind the scenes with Local Guy in the front
man/fall guy role.

Yesterday, by the way, the first formal demand (after
several days of parades/demos/confrontations) finally emerged from the Occupy
side.Through the magic of Twitter, starting
with a classic piece of inversion by the headline-writer at the Rappler (it has
come to my attention that the most widely adopted slander/misrepresentation
format is to print a reasonably accurate article under a misleading and
inflammatory headline and/or descriptive slug.I wonder if this approach has been shown to be effective in gulling the general
public, which maybe simply skims the headlines and can’t be bothered to read
the supporting text):

What Leung actually
said is "I'm asking them to fulfill their promise". This is more like a demand, from OHK:
"If Leung announces his resignation, this occupation will be at least
temporarily stopped in a short period of time, and we will decide on the next
move." I wonder if the CCP will find this package of concessions and
threats attractive enough to can Leung."Dump
Leung so we claim victory, go home, get some rest, and come back next
week" doesn't sound like an irresistible offer.Is this the sign of a deep game...or no game?

In my personal opinion, I don’t think the CCP plans to fire C.Y.
Leung (reviled by the demonstrators as Beijing’s incapable stooge) on the
say-so of a bunch of students led by a seventeen year old because a very big
crowd of demonstrators showed up on the streets for a few days.

And I don’t think the demonstrators expect this either.The main objective is to trumpet Leung’s
intransigence (with, it seems, a little reality-massaging help from outlets
like The Rappler) to justify bigger demonstrations, more outrage and, I expect,
if and when the demonstrations gain significant traction and Hong Kong is
polarizing to Occupy’s advantage then the Occupy elders will emerge to make
their demands on the Hong Kong government from a position of optimal strength.

And I strongly suspect the CCP knows the Occupy game plan,
not just because of the reality on the ground but because Occupy is probably
chockablock with moles feeding info to Hong Kong and PRC security forces (and
Occupy I expect is running a few countermoles; I also take Benny Tai’s rather
preposterous occasions of handwringing over “Occupy is fading” or “Occupy is
outta control” over the last few weeks as disinfo meant to sandbag public
opinion and manage its expectations, if not the PRC’s).

Won’t find much of this kind of ruminating over the Occupy
strategy or the day-to-day mindset of its leadership in the Western press.In fact, one senior editor disgorged a tweet
today that the Occupy movement was leaderless, a misrepresentation that I, in
my current frame of mind, found more sinister than ridiculous.

Instead, there’s been a spate of articles purporting to get
inside the faraway and unfamiliar territory of Xi Jinping’s head—as I put it in
twitter terms "brilliant Western journos lecture Commie dictator on how to
run his f*cked up country" pieces. The pieces pontificate on Xi’s lack of
options, his rigidity, his lack of moral clarity, how he’s boxed himself into a
corner on Hong Kong etc. with a declaration that he brought the crisis on
himself by the PRC government’s issuing the inflammatory White Paper on Hong
Kong governance.

(I think history will
judge, once it gets around to the issue, that the Occupy activists seized on
the White Paper—which primarily stated that the PRC ultimately runs the show in
Hong Kong, an observation that I think was no surprise to anybody—as a pretext
for kicking off the current movement.If
it wasn’t the White Paper, it would have been something else.)

I also think, especially if Hong Kong doesn’t blow up in
Occupocalypse (c) ! In the next few weeks, that a lot of journos should be pretty
embarrassed about what they wrote and tweeted.But I kind of doubt it.

The key journalistic framing/expectation is that Hong Kong
is Tiananmen Redux.As I discussed in a
previous post, Hong Kong is a big and dangerous problem, but it is no
Tiananmen.As a reminder, the CCP was
shaken to its core in 1989 by a major economic and political crisis, a split
leadership, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators camped out in the nation’s
capital and demonstrations, violence, and factionalism in virtually all of
China’s major urban centers while, on top of everything else, the Soviet Union—which
was generally considered at the time the PRC’s military, economic, and
organizational superior—collapsed in chaos.

Hong Kong 2014 not so much.

Nevertheless—and despite the fact that the CCP’s main job
description is dealing every year with the literally thousands of admittedly
less dire “mass incidents” prompted by the cruelties and inefficiencies of its rule
without military force--the breathless prediction is that Xi can’t make
concessions; so he’s gonna send in the tanks!

I find this scenario pretty unlikely.Could happen (throw in the necessary ass-covering
hedge) but Hong Kong is still a special case, with the crisis largely
limited to Hong Kong, with the PRC regime prosperous and united and with
resources of money and influence that would dwarf anything that Li Peng could
have imagined in 1989.And whatever combination
of soldiers and People’s Armed Police the PRC decides to throw at Hong Kong if
the local cops are overwhelmed and insurrection rears its head, they will
probably perform their jobs more neatly and professionally than the disoriented
blunderers of the 38th Field Army in 1989.

Hong Kong also has limited resonance inside China because
the segment of the Hong Kong population alienated from the PRC and out on the
streets is also the segment that has alienated the mainlander population with
its abrasive and condescending chauvinism, an awkward fact apparently skated
over in fawning Western coverage of the adorable demonstrators.

Though generations of journos, activists, and scholars would
disagree, I find the Tiananmen analogy way past its sell-by date and a barrier
to understanding what the PRC can and will do.I suspect the West clings to it because it provides that instantaneous
good guy/bad guy framing so important to public diplomacy.Also, on a deeper level, the Tiananmen meme
hearkens back to a happier, sunnier time when the US was the omnipotent and
benevolent lawgiver in a unipolar world, and not a peer competitor in relative
decline, increasingly perceived as an incompetent and resented mangler of
nations.

Finally, of course, the prospect of a bloody crackdown, even
if it currently exists primarily in the expectations of the foreign media,
allows the West to claim humanitarian and/or security skin in the game.Call it R2P, call it solicitude for the
immense importance of Hong Kong as a linchpin of the global financial system
(forgetting the fact that Hong Kong’s jittery tycoons are still firmly lined up
on Beijing’s side), and the West can inject itself into what is still a messy
but manageable political crisis in Hong Kong.

And, if you’re going to hype a potential massacre, you’d
better hype the innocent adorableness of the demonstrators.I agree, the demonstrators are adorable, but the
extent to which Western and Hong Kong journos swoon over their umbrella-brandishing,
trash-collecting, and banana-offering ways is ludicrous and misleading.The general intent appears to be to present
the demonstrations as a spontaneous outpouring of indignation by innocents,
thereby depriving them of agency (to trot out a sociological term) and make the
other side responsible for anything that happens to them.

This is, of course, an important framing because, in
addition to being personally adorable, the demonstrators will be engaging in
actions that might be considered obnoxious: tying up roads, storming government
buildings, etc.Heartfelt emotional
expressions of unconditional student-love might be needed to paper over a few
excesses.

All in all, I predict predictable if not coordinated synergies
in escalating unrest, escalating BS in the media, and escalating handwringing
by foreign governments.

As to where it all ends, my guess is that, thanks to the
growing alienation of the Hong Kong population and its encouragement and
celebration by foreign governments and media, the Hong Kong governance problem
will never go away.The priority of the
CCP will be to try to keep a lid on it, manage it, and try to divide and weaken
the pro-democracy movement to the point that the Hong Kong populace becomes
disillusioned and the city can return to business as usual.

The key question for me is, if the CCP keeps its cool,
avoids the ultimate polarizing crisis, and settles in for protracted, slow-burn
war, will the interests and strategies of the United States and the Occupy
movement diverge?

The U.S. willingness to see the PRC hoisted on its
anti-democratic petard—and encourage the process—should be apparent to anyone
who follows these issues.And it’s Hong
Kong today, Taiwan tomorrow, as strategists are well aware.

Best case, for the US anyway, is the PRC commits some
immense, irretrievable blunder in its handling of the Hong Kong crises, with major,
debilitating knock-on effects in Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet, and maybe the Han
heartland.

But that’s not necessarily the best-case situation for Hong
Kong.

There is no conceivable scenario in which the US can project
meaningful support for the movement inside Hong Kong.The best it can promise if things turn to
sh*t is escape, asylum, and sinecures for the leaders.

Wonder if that will be enough for the
leadership…or the people on the streets.

6 comments:

I sincerely hope the leadership will keep a "stiff upper lip", not cave to any extortionate demands, and not resort to any drastic retaliation. Russia's response in the wake of Ukraine is instructive ... in exactly how not to manage these Western-coordinated color revolutions.

Sad to see anybody taking Moon of Alabama seriously. Basically, they employ formulas rather than analysis. Conspiracy theory rather than class analysis. If you are looking to "expose" a movement because of aid from imperialism, you'd might as well start with Mao Zedong and Ho Chi-Minh who both took arms and training from the OSS.